Childhood
by Youkomon
Summary: Take out my bones, for I have sinned. [A realistic look on the failed adult relationship of Netto and Meiru through the eyes of an unusual individual. Contains many issues found today.]


Yes indeed, I am eighteen today. Happy b-day to moi.

A very different story from others I've done. Be prepared for some controversial ideas…okay, some of them may seem controversial. Chances are you're seen worse.

This is a representative of what real life is. Love doesn't last forever and comes in many shapes and forms, messing up a lot of people in the process.

Set in the anime verse, which means, of course, that Saito does not exist. Rockman is merely a navi with that ultimate program inside him. If he was Saito then you'd all be having my blood…but you won't find out why it's so vital Saito doesn't exist unless you read to the very end. I'm serious about this.

Inspired somewhat by Kirsty Gunn. Go read some of her novels, she's a brilliant author with one of the most astonishing grasp of descriptive writing I've ever come across. It really carries across the story and makes it travel forward in a way many authors will never achieve. That hint is directed towards Yami Katie in particular. She's one of the few people I can actually have a decent conversation with over a book and symbolism.

* * *

The glass felt smooth and cold beneath my fingers. Unchipped. My palm presses down hard as though it wants to slide through the surface and touch the garnish of bright colours and lies within. Lies, lies, lies. Only for some people they may be vital truths.

How would I know? I was so young back then.

I loved that shop though. All the rich girls got their birthday cakes from there, silken sponge wrapped round and about with velvet icing of the purest snow. Snow that wouldn't bite your tongue with the bitterness of cold and was kept neatly contained with the stretching of pink ribbon. But even if you were poor, there were cheap gingerbread men, all spindly legged and cross-eyed with raisons that were never burned. The cherries on their pretend jackets would catch the merry light of the ceiling lights inside and sparkle like exotic jewels. They were like rubies to us, snap down too hard with your teeth and the juice spurts out and impairs the flavour. But squeeze gently enough and the jewel will surrender and relinquish the taste to your over eager mouth.

But what I loved the most were those small cakes, made rich and gold with a brief oven basking and painted with splashes of green, blue and pink sugar. You could crunch into them and the sugar would coat your bones with a rush of guilty pleasure. But they were so pretty….the owner used to wrap them up in a proper bag encased with the same crinkles of his smile that had been moulded from an age of kindness and experience of a world without it.

Do you know how good it feels to bite into something fresh and warm in the street, crumbs arching from your mouth in brown showers as your tear it from greasy paper?

My mother always made me eat on plates, cutting off the crusts from my sandwiches and loping the fat off my meat. She executed the mess of childhood. She was everything she was meant to be, supposed to be. And I both loathed and adored her for it.

She never liked that shop, deliberately lingering over the display cases, turning her pretty nose up at the wind chimes glittering, shimmering over the door in musical melodies she could never get the piano to intimate. Perhaps she was jealous.

"Maybe a coconut crust…or maybe a ginger sponge…no, not lemon meringue, it's too expensive, sweetheart… you call _that_ a chocolate cake?"

And all the time I heard the hissing issuing from the bundle of people trapped behind her. I averted my eyes and imagined that they were melting into a gooey heap of eyeballs and tree sap comprised of a tone of flesh.

Yet for all her petty hating, we still went down to that same store every Wednesday afternoon. I was still young enough to think my mother was one of the most glorious human beings on earth.

Why go to something you hate?

Every evening, the same story. She would curl me into her, running her hands over slipstreams of limbs that had crashed their way out of her in blood and pain. She would smile and dig a deeper hole in her embrace for me to fall into. I was crushed by her love.

"You have your father's eyes. And his hair too…"

Already her fingers snaking their pale thinness into my tuffs of brown locks, hanging down limply like death caught in a balance between heaven and hell. A thumb weaving it's way in and curling a strand round into a hopeless ringlet.

"His hair was so stubborn…just like him…it would stick out, spring out whenever I touched it."

I listened to her crones, knowing that it was not me she was seeing, not me she was feeling, but my father.

I can still recall the bunched up skin, her eyebrows cutting down like venom as she frowns.

"Why is it so flat?"

And the spell would shatter. And always, always, she would gasp and hug me even tighter as though she could reclaim the moment of possession by holding me.

"Your father loves you darling, you know that right? You must remember that, no matter what. He will always love you."

She neglected to say anything about herself, her own needs. It was okay. I knew she was selfish but her maternal instants held her back, prevented her from inflicting verbal pain on the life the nurses pulled out of her. I knew she was screaming with jealousy over the fact that I had my father running inside my veins and not hers. Not anymore. They were no longer connected by passion, breathing new life into each other's willowy frames.

But she was inside me too. That's why when she drank in her own memories and saw him living in me, she could never drag herself too far away. Because my hair hang down as flat and gravity-obedient as her own red river of nature that clung to her neck in sticky strands. Because my eyebrows were as thin and slender as her own feminine streaks above her eyes. Because I always burned in the sun instead of tanning the way she wanted me to.

Oh mother. I believe you loved me. I just don't believe you loved me enough.

My father came to collect me at weekends. Unlike my mother, he never cried, never touched me or gathered me up into his strong arms as though I would break. He simply smiled and held my hand, called me 'his girl'. He would laugh with his eyes as well as his mouth and he never fussed about the way I ate.

Cotton candy on a Saturday, the taste was sticky and sweet, pink running over my mouth and rippling down into my throat. I would lick it from my fingers and then his own would wrap around mine, squishing through the sweat and sugar as he led me through the crowds, to the park or back to his house. He never complained about any mess I made, he even helped me carve out pictures with wax crayons and we made up stories with battles and soldiers.

He never engulfed himself in memories, choosing to make new ones with me. I loved him for that.

"I'll never leave you alone. Whenever you need me, just call."

He made me promises and could see steely determination behind his words. And I knew then, he would never let me down, would never strangle me with the past. And I thought that for a second I understood why my mother married him.

Papa…did you know what it was to be lonely too?

I liked talking to Rockman, he was funny. He liked to tell me to do my homework and would pout when I giggled and my father stuck his tongue out at him. And I would tell him things, the secrets of a child's heart that a parent can never understand. And he would listen with that thoughtful posture I came to associate with him, giving advice and uttering his words with the soft-spoken politeness I had never heard from anyone else. I thought he was the strangest person on earth…or out of it…but he was also the sanest one I knew. When I was eleven I developed a kind of crush on him…I mean he was adorable…

What? He had cool hair and eyes and he was the kindest boy I've ever met. All the ones at school used to circle me in the playground and pelt me with rusty sticks of chalk and smear rainbow tattooed fingertips over my clothes…

"_Ring-a-ring-a roses,_

_A pocket full of poses, _

_Atisho, atisho, Hikari falls down._

_Your mummy's in the water,_

_Your daddy flushed her out to sea,_

_You all rot in hell while we go free_!"

My mother turned pale when she saw them and I heard the blood fall from her face to her feet.

"Miharu! Here! Now!"

It was the only time she ever held my hand. And then she said words, hard, cruel, cutting words that caused those boys to gasp and run away.

They never surrounded me again or teased me. But sometimes I heard the whisper of that same rhyme echo in the cloakroom whenever my head lowered to pick out my shoelace.

I wanted to gorge out their eyes. I wanted them to hurt as much as I did.

And all the while my mother would hold me as though their taunts would snatch me away from her care, whispering, crooning to my naked ears.

"It's alright darling, it's alright. I love you, your father loves you, it's alright. It's just silly boys playing silly games. You're strong, you have your dad's blood in you."

Did my Papa ever know about the boys? I don't know. But I began to notice the stares and whispers, the way his hand would enclose mine just that little tighter and how the corners of his lips would clench as though to shut out the poison of the public's thoughts from my ears.

My poor Papa. Unlike my mother he knew how to show me love, proper love that was untainted by a longing to revisit the past, but he suffered for the choices he made and he knew I was a stain that caused people to turn him away because of that.

I wonder how he kissed my mother? I always wondered that, it seemed impossible and wrong…considering, well, everything.

I remember my mother wrapping herself in beautiful gowns, spraying herself with perfume in a giddy swell of emotion.

"I was wearing this…your father walked me over to a mirror the night he proposed to me. He told me I was beautiful."

Than her smile would turn ugly and she would thrash and scream in her drunken rage, slicing her nails though her hand mirror until I saw red beads of liquid leap over her skin.

"Mummy…mummy, stop! You're frightening me!"

She couldn't hear me. She would never hear me. Because I wasn't enough like him. I. Wasn't. Enough. For. Her.

"Why wasn't it enough! I gave him all the beauty I had to offer!"

Then she stopped and silver liquid from her glazed eyes mixed in with the blood and trailed over her ripped dress. She had been saving it for my wedding day.

"Well…Netto, do you still think I'm beautiful now?"

Her words were enough to break me. I wish Papa could have heard them.

The priest says Papa is going to hell for what he did to my mother.

Can you…keep a secret? You see…

My Papa kisses boys.

That's why he left my mother. Other men give him things she cannot. I didn't understand, maybe I never will. But my Papa's happy and he's alive in a way my mother is not. And I know that if he had stayed with her…they would both be dead on the inside.

How can he be going to hell for being happy?

If they had stayed, they would've argued like Hounda-san's parents. He says it sounds like they're trying to kill each other, rip themselves out of love by snarling angry hatred. I would have died if I heard mine tear into each other like that. Mother unhappy because he can't love her the way she loves him and him miserable because he can't feel the same way she does. I think it's better like this.

Or at least I did until I came home one day to find my mother lying on the sofa, eyes bulging and waxed over with milk-like entrails. I grabbed her hand and the red blood swam over my grip and set it free. It flopped. Like a fish. A fish swimming out to sea.

The boys were right. Papa really did flush her away.

I stood still, even as Papa hugged me and cried, even as the men in red coats came to lift her stiff form into a van of bright lights and impossibly white sheets. Because that thing wasn't my mother. Perhaps I never really knew my mother.

Roll once showed me a film of her and my Papa having a picnic together. They looked so happy…she was smiling, lit up in a way I had never witnessed. She laughed, a silver bell ringing out through the sound waves, like the wind chimes in the bakery. The sound of freedom and youth. When things were simple.

I didn't understand how a woman could love a man so much that she could kill herself by that same emotion years later.

It wasn't until years later that I was standing at the altar with my Papa giving me away in a purple gown Roll had found off the net. It brought out my eyes she said, smiling at me as my own virtual flower girl, a net navi passed on from mother to daughter by a bond of love that could not be broken even when tainted. She was mine, a sole reminder of the woman my mother once was and I would do anything to prevent her deletion if ever faced with such a threat. I would not lose any of my memories.

I looked up into the eyes of Hounda-san, seeing his mother, Yaito, blowing her nose a few feet away. I was marrying him because I needed to escape from my father, I needed to find a new place in the world. A place where I could not make the same mistakes as my parents, where I would not be defined by who they thought they saw in me. I was not my mother.

I thought of everything as I walked forwards, my father's grip never faltering. I could see security in my future husband's eyes…promises that were not as firm as my Papa's…love? Maybe. Why else would he be here?

I still didn't understand how a woman could love a man so much she could die years later…

Then I glanced back at my father's shoulder and saw Rockman's holograph watching me, smiling sadly with unspent emotion and knowing. My heart rushed into my mouth with a pang of emotion so strong that I choked.

And suddenly I did understand.

"Miharu? Are you alright?"

My father's eyes. But I could never tell him the truth.

"Yes…Papa."

He smiles and Roll turns her head away. She has witnessed my revelation and knows what it means. I can see her shoulders shaking…everyone else thinks she weeps for joy. I know better. Her tears are for me.

I smile at my Papa's trusting face, feeling the part of him that is inside me rise up and take hold. I am brave enough to create a new future.

"Miharu Hikari…my little girl…I'm so proud of you."

So why is it, in this moment, that I feel more like a Sakura?

I meet Rockman's eyes. And I know exactly why. I just wish my mother hadn't put so much of herself into me. Take out my bones, for I have sinned.

The cycle has came back round. And now it my turn to love someone I cannot have.

Oh, mother. I was a foolish little girl. You tried to warn me didn't you? But I never listened. And now it's too late.

I just wish I could have smashed the lights of the ambulance when they came for you.

* * *

To all you SRMTHFG board members who may be reading this…yes I selected Miharu's name because it seemed to fit and she told us that it meant 'clear sky' in Japanese. Yes, I know her OC has the same name as well. Just thought I'd better mention if one of you ever does read this and wonders why I've selected the name…

Miharu is the first OC I have ever created. Ever. And I actually felt myself warming to her as I wrote out her story…what did she feel? Why was she feeling this? What was the purpose of her story? What was she trying to tell us?

Normally I hate OCs and refrain from writing them. But Miharu was someone I carved from various situations I've seen happen to different people and indeed some of my own. I just feel she deserved to be heard even if only once. And I'm sorry to those of you who hate her guts for whatever reason.

I'll tell you this. I'm very glad I wrote out this story from her point of view. Orginally it was in the 3rd person tense and just seemed to wander around like a blind sheep. Or a Dory…yeah, a Dory….


End file.
